The future of the West L.A. VA campus is unclear. This is its history

Isn’t this just a classic Los Angeles story?

Fighting over land — who had it, who has it now, who’ll get it?

Right now it’s a fight in a courtroom, over who should have the right and the duty to decide the destiny of the hundreds of acres of the federal Veterans Affairs department’s West L.A. campus. For those of you who are new to this place, this is some of the juiciest land in the juicy neighborhood of Westwood.

By L.A.’s yardstick of history, its story goes way back, like Queen-Victoria-and-first-movie-camera far back, to when it was first dedicated to the nation’s suffering soldiery, and then back a century before then.

First, long before that, the Spanish and Mexicans wrested it away from the Native Americans. Then, the Yankees wangled and wooed it away from the Spanish and Mexicans. Then, in 1888, its acres were set aside for disabled and destitute veterans.

The first Civil War soldier to move in was a private from New York, and so anxious was he that he pitched a tent, unwilling to wait for the wooden barracks to be finished. Some of the many fanciful gingerbread buildings that arose there were supposedly designed by the scandalously famous architect Stanford White and bore a resemblance to the Hotel del Coronado, which opened the same year.

(Of all of these, only the historic 1900 Wadsworth chapel still stands, and by the skin of its teeth; millions are needed to bring it back to a state fit for so singular a historic building.)

These veterans had already done their share of fighting over land, battling across northern states and southern states — the United States versus the Confederate States, the land of the freed versus the land of the enslaved.

About six weeks before the Civil War and his own life ended, Abe Lincoln created a system of national homes for disabled U.S. soldiers, and in time, this Westwood land, about 600 acres of it, became the system’s westernmost outpost.

Over four abattoir years, almost a third of a million of the Union’s “boys in blue” had been wounded — not all of them catastrophically, but so many unwell enough in mind or body that they had no work and couldn’t do any, and had no home and couldn’t find one.

And then, here it was, awaiting them, Southern California, the lustrous edge of the continent, promising care and the company of comrades. First came the blue-suited Yankees. Hundreds of them marched — marched — down from Northern California to this new billet.

In time it welcomed the Rough Riders and their fellows, the World War I doughboys, the GI Joes of the “good war,” the not-a-war-but-a-conflict Korean veterans, the grunts and jarheads of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.

The thing about the national homes is that they weren’t only places for charity and mercy; they were, to the towns outside its gates, a business. Civic eagerness to land these homes was like today’s competition for amusement parks or mega-corporations.

These ex-servicemen would need food, sundries, smokes — hundreds of things, and thousands in pension dollars landed in their pockets, right? On one Saturday in 1904, $80,000 arrived in the Westwood old soldiers’ accounts. Surely some of this would find its way beyond the gates and into the towns?

So there were offers aplenty to welcome these veterans’ homes, dozens of them. The whole of Catalina Island was offered up. The winner was a carrot-and-stick combo, a donation not only made from the goodness of the heart but one that was good for the bottom line.

A formidable trio of landowners — one of them the philanthropist Arcadia Bandini Stearns de Baker, heiress to lands by birth and by marriage; her husband; and a Nevada senator — had founded Santa Monica in the 1870s. Eventually their gifts added up to about 600 acres for a place that would help the veterans, and help to put Santa Monica and the future town of Sawtelle on the map.

And so the Disabled Soldiers’ Home arose on the land, with a rich water supply and a $100,000 gift from the land donors that made the place into a vast, ornamentally gardened neighborhood of splendid trees set along artistically meandering paths, and the less flashy greenery of vegetable and fruit gardens.

It may have looked like paradise, but it could hardly always live up to its landscaping. In July 1901, an effigy hanging near the entrance of the home bore on its chest a placard reading “1/4 master” — quartermaster, the man in charge of survival basics such as food and water. The Times flicked it away as a joke, and reported dutifully — the paper’s owner was a Civil War veteran — that there was no truth to the rumor of a grudge against the quartermaster, Major J.B. Simpson, “because of a lack of oleomargarine … it is [contractor’s] fault … there is no outcry against the quartermaster.” How surprised The Times sounded a month later, when Simpson was suspended from his job over what the newspaper perplexingly reported to be “a case of unsatisfactory bookkeeping … [there is] no question reflecting on the integrity of Major Simpson.”

A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows barracks at the Sawtelle Soldiers’ Home.

The place had running water, a bakery, a library and a small theater — but it was a regulated life all the same, a barracks system with officers, uniforms, curfews and summons to meals and musters.

And no drinking. As many as 3,000 men at a time lived here, and for men in pain of one kind or another, worldly distractions beckoned — not just cigars and magazines, but fleshly delights.

The Times described these in March 1904 with lubricious gusto:

“With wolfish eagerness, a horde of thugs, gamblers, prostitutes and sellers of evil liquors lay in wait yesterday, at the very gates of the Soldiers’ Home for the pension money paid in large amounts to the old veterans last Saturday.” Two men leaving a “gambling hell” were beaten and robbed within arm’s reach of the gates. Liquor of every ferocity and quality lasted as long as the money held out, and bordellos were a way station on wild nights on the town.

Liquored-up veterans could be disciplined or fined or even expelled from the regimented Eden. One ex-soldier was dishonorably discharged from the Soldiers’ Home for running a gambling parlor just outside the gates. He was given the choice of shutting down his business instead, but he opted for the boot — he was making way too much money on the outside to give it up.

In April 1927, years into the national dry spell called Prohibition, the governor of the home was enforcing rules against drunkenness “and other vices.” In consequence, threats to “burn [him] out” were no pranks over margarine: nine arson fires in a few weeks. Four years later, thoughtfully but perhaps unhelpfully, a federal judge decreed that 28 bottles of champagne seized from a drugstore not far from the Soldiers’ Home be donated to the old fellows.

When these men died, aged before their years, many were buried in the national cemetery to the east of the Soldiers’ Home, now divided from it by the 405 Freeway. The Times often published the lists of their names and regiments, like a phantom roll call: the 121st Ohio, the 11th Indiana, the 29th Michigan, the 17th Kansas, the 10th Wisconsin.

These vintage postcards from Patt Morrison’s collection depict the people and grounds of what we now call the West L.A. VA campus.

But there were also enough accounts of unsettling deaths, by suicide or “accident,” to make you wonder about the unreported ones, and the iceberg depths of damage beyond Minié balls and bayonets.

A hundred years before there was a precise name for it, the symptoms were unmistakable. The gore and dismemberment of Civil War weaponry left these men with nightmarish problems that we would nowadays label PTSD.

The Civil War’s close-range battles and grislier gun technology meant whole masses of men were cut down, “showering survivors with the blood, brains, and body parts of their comrades,” the Smithsonian magazine wrote in 2015. “Many soldiers regarded the aftermath of battle as even more horrific, describing landscapes so body-strewn that one could cross them without touching the ground.”

In December 1902, an old soldier, said to be mortally ill, cut his own throat on a street in Sawtelle and died a couple of weeks later. About the same time, a Missouri infantryman and musician in the home’s band fell back into the sodden embrace of booze after years of sobriety, went back to his barracks and swallowed hydrochloric acid. One in a while, a veteran wandered or fell onto the trolley tracks and didn’t hear or chose not to hear the warning clang of the bell of an approaching train.

In June 1904, a surgeon finishing up at the home’s hospital turned around to see a “crazed veteran” pointing a .38 at him. “Now I’ve got you,” the veteran said. Since being treated by the surgeon a year earlier, he’d held on to a “fancied grievance.” The surgeon and two other doctors got the gun away from him.

The happier stories got more play, naturally. One evening in the autumn of 1903, an old soldier strolling a Sawtelle street heard someone say the name “Russell.”

“Which is Russell?” he asked.

“I am,” said one man in the crowd.

“What’s your first name?”

“John.”

“Where do you hail from?”

“Southampton, Connecticut. Why?”

“The devil you say! Why, I’m a Southampton man. Did you ever know Harry Russell there?”

“Why, yes — that’s my little brother’s name!”

“Well, I’ll bet that’s me!”

The movie version would make this scene snappier, but here’s the backstory:

The two men were indeed brothers: John and Henry. John, the elder, lit out for the West in 1857, wound up in Illinois, joined the Union Army for the duration and beyond, and came to Sawtelle in 1900. Henry, the younger, left home at 13 for no place in particular and he, too, fought in the Civil War, settled in Arizona and moved to Sawtelle in 1894. The two had not seen each other in 47 years. Like so many L.A. stories, it took this detached pair the long trip to California to find each other.

As the mechanics of warfare changed, the home’s work changed. By the early 1960s, the Wadsworth hospital and residences were dealing with more than 4,500 patients, as they were now called, and an additional 2,500 at the neuropsychiatric hospital on the grounds. The 1971 Sylmar quake put an end to the old hospital, and a new complex on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard rose up.

In 1930, the system of soldiers’ homes began to wind down. More space and care were devoted to mental health. Treatment and research facilities began to shoulder the residences aside. Housing space was now just for patients, not simply down-and-out veterans.

What a paradox: This city, and the feds, are now trying with might and main to find housing for its veterans — in effect to re-create a barracks that thousands of veterans had called home.

This vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection bears a 1907 postmark and shows an aerial view of the Soldiers’ Home.

A federal judge, David O. Carter — a former Vietnam combat Marine, recipient of the Bronze Star and Purple Heart — has decreed that the VA broke faith with the place’s mission and undertook rich but illegal leases of the land to non-veteran interests — a baseball stadium for UCLA, a sports complex for a private school. And he ordered the VA to build enough housing for 2,500. Water must flow back uphill.

President McKinley visited Los Angeles and the Soldiers’ Home in May of 1901. If their faces were not familiar to him, their stories were, for McKinley had served in the Union Army.

As he wound up his speech to the mustered lines of men, he said something that bears repeating now, when we are testing its truth: “The government for which you fought … that government will see to it that in your declining years you shall not suffer but shall be surrounded with all the comforts and all the blessings which a grateful nation can provide.”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.